This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
While this list is an entertaining read, it was heavy on PR faux pas, with concentration on too many high-visibility companies and stories. But I suppose a publication like Business 2.0, born in the dot-com era, can probably be excused for thinking that bad PR counts as "dumbest."
I don't want to go off on a rant here, but the real dumbest things that go on in business are more closely related to the things that people think are common sense, like...
...using milestone deadlines to assure project progress, when in fact, they both lengthen and delay projects as people estimate to cover their assumptions and then yield up any good luck they have to protect their estimates. (A source of Parkinson's Law).
...making moves to lay people off when faced with a constraint in their market. What the hell does internal cost-cutting have to do with external strategic and marketing issues? Resources, especially human resources, are flexible, and can address many markets. It's the everyday failure of management/leadership that keeps those markets out of the picture.
...making sure that there are no idle resources, which then guarantees no protective capacity/capability to recover when Murphy's Law strikes. (Applicable in both overstressed project environments, and overlean manufacturing environments.)
...believing that an activity, or a product, or a service has a caculatable cost associated with it, and therefore an appropriate and particular price associated with it, and therefore a profit associated with it. Resources have costs. Organizations make profits. Allocated product margins/profits lead to more bad decisions than lucky ones.
...and many other more mundane, but common, applications of erroneous assumptions.
But then that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
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